Mechanical components with toothing that generally form a gearing system are widely used in mechanics to transmit motion, for example in the aeronautical, automotive and clock-making sectors. These mechanical components must be made with high precision in their dimensions or shape and they should be of constant and suitable quality.
It is therefore necessary to provide for dimensional inspection or controls for each of these components in order to ascertain that they are in truly compliance with the requisite manufacturing tolerance values. Such inspection is generally performed on the production line and involves a certain number of dimensional characteristics, namely: the shape and/or dimension of the toothing systems, the pitch of each toothing, the orientation of the toothing systems relative to the main axis of the component etc.
A classic solution consists in inspecting these components when they come off the production line either manually or by using automated dimensional inspection machines such as mechanical sensing machines. These sensing machines are used to acquire the dimensions and the shape of a component and then to check it.
However, the visual inspection of the components responds neither to high production rates nor to quality requirements in certain industrial fields, especially the aeronautical and automotive sectors where certain defects remain difficult to identify with the naked eye.
Mechanical sensing solutions also require a discontinuous inspection process that needs relatively lengthy inspection time. In addition, components with toothing generally have a complex shape (the toothing elements may have a particular shape and inclination relative to the axis of the particular component for example) requiring the use of separate machines to enable the inspection of all the dimensional characteristics of these components, and this is not an optimal method. In addition, present-day contactless inspection systems cannot be used to achieve the precision and rates (speeds) dictated by the manufacturing sector.
It is therefore desirable to propose an automatic inspection machine capable of carrying out precise, reproducible and high-speed checks on all the dimensional characteristics of mechanical components with toothing.